Netflix, plug-ins and virtually crippled on Windows 8

It’s been a busy few days here at Microsoft’s Build conference, but I finally got some time to dive deeper into Windows 8 on the Samsung Series 7 700T tablet loaned to press and given outright to developers. I also was able to install the Win8 developer preview release in a virtual machine in Parallels Desktop 7 on my MacBook Pro.

Here are a couple of random notes based on some of my experiences with the OS on two very different devices.

• On Wednesday night, I opted to relax in my room rather than hit the big attendee party at The Grove. Seeing about 20 full-size buses sitting outside the hotel, ready to shuttle attendees to the venue, made me decide I’d rather be a hermit. I decided to fire up the Samsung tablet and catch a couple of episodes of the British spy drama MI-5 (a.k.a. Spooks) via Netflix.

I launched the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10, logged into my Netflix account and clicked on an episode. But instead of the show, I got a prompt to install Silverlight, the Microsoft-created plug-in that Netflix requires to stream video to a browser.

However, it turns out that Microsoft doesn’t allow plug-ins with the Metro version of IE. When I downloaded and ran the Silverlight installer, Windows 8 automatically switched to the classic desktop. I went back to the Metro version of IE10 and was again prompted to install Silverlight when I tried to watch the episode, even though I had just installed it. I returned to the desktop and could watch from that version of IE10.

The reality today is that sites are already rapidly engineering for a plug-in free experience. Google, for example, recently launched their HTML5 YouTube site for phones. A previous IE blog post discussed how plug-in free sites are becoming more mainstream, and what sites can do to run plug-in free. We examined the use of plug-ins across the top 97,000 sites worldwide, a corpus which includes local sites outside the US in significant depth. Many of the 62% of these sites that currently use Adobe Flash already fall back to HTML5 video in the absence of plug-in support. When serving ads in the absence of plug-ins, most sites already perform the equivalent of this fallback, showing that this approach is practical and scalable. There’s a steep drop-off in plug-in usage after Flash, with one control used on 2% of sites and a small collection of controls used on between 0.5% and 0.75% of sites.

On Windows 8, consumer sites and “line of business” applications that require legacy ActiveX controls will continue to run in the desktop browser, and people can tap “Use Desktop View” in Metro style IE for these sites. For what these sites do, the power of HTML5 makes more sense, especially in Windows 8 apps.

Microsoft could, of course, build Silverlight into the Metro version of IE, but has opted instead to support the open Web technologies in HTML5. In that sense, Microsoft’s move similar to the design decision made by Apple in iOS. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Flash is an endangered species, something even Adobe understands, since it just announced it would support non-Flash video through its latest Flash server, making it easy for Flash apps and animation to be viewed on iOS devices . . . and now, of course, the Metro version of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.

By the way, I wound up watching the last two episodes of season 2 of MI-5 on my MacBook Pro. The hotel Wi-Fi the tablet was using just wasn’t as solid as the Ethernet connection to my notebook.

• I don’t have a native Windows computer with me in Anaheim, so once I got my hands on a copy of the Windows 8 developer preview, I dropped it into a Parallels Desktop 7 virtual machine. (I also have a copy of the new VMware Fusion 4 product, which was released yesterday, but haven’t had time yet to install Win8 in it.)

Because of some technical issues, the results are highly inconclusive.

When you first install Windows 8 in Parallels, you must identify what version of Windows it is. Since Parallels 7 doesn’t “know” about Win8, the next logical choice is Windows 7.

The installation took a long time, and eventually dropped me to the classic desktop. I could click over to the Start screen, but couldn’t do much there. This is likely because I can’t install Parallels Tools, the special drivers that load in virtual machines to provide full-featured mouse, keyboard, video, audio and network support.

I’m fairly limited as to what I can do – scroll side to side, launch tiles, launch the desktop. Windows key-combinations work, so I can access the charms, for example, by doing a Command (the Windows key equivalent) and C. It’s much easier to work in the classic desktop in this crippled mode.

I’ll offer a more detailed description of what Win8 is like on a non-touch device once I can install it on a real hardware. In the interim, let me recommend this Ars Technica story by Peter “Dr. Pizza” Bright on what it’s like to run Windows 8 on a traditional PC. A sample:

However, just as is the case with Windows Vista and Windows 7, where clicking icons on the Start menu wasn’t the best way to use the platform, clicking tiles on the Start screen isn’t the best approach either. Keyboard users never have to click the search charm in the Edge UI. They can just start typing, and Windows 8 will search automatically. Though the presentation is very different from Windows 7′s, the functionality is the same: hit the Start button, start typing. Windows 8 does it better, in fact, due to the search contracts and in-app search features. If you use search and tiles pinned to the “main” (left-most) Start screen, applications are typically more accessible than they would be in the Start menu—few people pin 20 apps.